The news from these two past weeks allows us to closely follow the technical hiccup which has occurred on the Sidekick mobile phones associated with T-Mobile and Microsoft, resulting in the loss of several thousands of subscribers’ personal data due to a maintenance operation which turned out badly.

In summary, a problem occurred at the manufacturer (Danger, subsidiary of Microsoft) servers (hosted in the cloud) and as a result, the personal data stored on the phones – unfortunately delivered without any backup software – were purely and simply erased

This will result in a lot more fear than pain, since the companies involved will restore almost completely all of the data, but nonetheless these subscribers came close to a disaster!

Obviously traumatizing, this event immediately generated a lot of questions – quite legitimate – on the security front. Basically, what one can expect to find in the cloud and the danger that this technology potentially represents.

Consequently, after all of the legitimate enthusiasm surrounding the cloud shown in the press these last months, we heard just heard the worst about cloud-computing!

Then, what is it really? A few days ago (10/20/09), Gartner declared that Cloud Computing was to be placed first in IT investment priorities in terms of 2010 (http://bit.ly/3dNGom). Does Gartner show an unawareness of the security issues? Of course, not!

It is the same for the cloud-computing as it is for any company’s strategic application: it should be made safe and highly secure.

In conclusion, two precautions impossible to circumvent (our priority at ftopia, of course!) are to be taken in order to avoid the consequences of a technical failure: 1) your data must be automatically made redundant on geographically distant servers and 2) it must be synchronized with your PC, which represents an additional security measure that makes a great difference in the event of breakdown – even temporary – of one or more servers.